Trends

Rebellions seek to become the first Korean startup AI chips company

AuthorBTW Editorial

Reading Time2 min

PublishedMarch 19, 2024

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Headline

Context

OUR TAKE The global semiconductor industry has seen a surge in demand for AI chips, fuelled by the popularity of US start-up OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The establishment of Rebellions will be an important milestone for the South Korean chip industry, as Atom (the latest chip Rebellions makes) will be the first domestically developed, mass-produced chip to support language models. -Jennifer YU, BTW reporter Korea artificial intelligence (AI) chip company Rebellions is viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference.

Evidence

Pending intelligence enrichment.

Analysis

These chips, called Atom, are the latest neural processing units (NPUs), targeting artificial intelligence (AI) models trained with up to 7 billion parameters. The processors are being tested against industry-leading A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) from US giant Nvidia. Regarded as the next generation of AI chips, NPUs are optimised to perform so-called simultaneous matrix operations, which give them a step up in the AI method known as deep learning, compared with general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs. “We are much more energy-efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs in AI inference,” said Park Sung-hyun, CEO and co-founder of Rebellions.

Key Points

Rebellions, a fabless AI chip company co-founded by five South Korean engineers, is viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference
Rebellions has secured backing from some of the biggest names in the South Korean tech industry, including Samsung, telecoms company KT, and internet firm Kakao.